We only see
the wind because we see the tree’s reply to it. Timothy Donnelly’s long poem Hymn to Life behaves similarly, but
instead of the tree, it’s the past, and the force, rather than being the wind,
is life. Topping out at sixty stanzas, un-serialized, populated by facts pulled
from natural history with digressive little reveries into pop-culture,
biography, antiquity, and personal anecdote, the intrinsic spirit of Hymn to Life – perhaps one of the best
long poems written in recent memory – is
sympathy:
…There were no Steller’s sea cows, the
tame
kelp-nibbling cousins to the manatee,
albeit double their size,
and there were no great auks. The last
known pair of them
was claimed on July 3, 1844 by poachers
hired by a merchant
itching for tchotchkes to ornament an
office. Three long
winters later, rescue sledges bundled
McClure and crew up
and sped them back to the claps of
Britain. Soon Banks Island’s
musk ox population whittled down to nil
as their flesh gave
way to the hungry Inuit who trekked up
to 300 miles to strip
McClure’s abandoned ship before the ice
crushed her completely,
folding her metals into Mercy Bay. “I
took him by the neck
and he flapped his wings,” the poacher
said. “He made no cry.”
Inuit shaped Investigator’s copper and iron into
spear- and arrow-
heads as well as knife blades, chisels,
and harpoons like those
depicted in lithographs in the mitts of
seal hunters patiently
stationed at breathing holes in the ice.
But there were no
broad-leaved centaury plants, no western
sassafras, and no
Galapagos amaranth, cousin to the
seabeach amaranth. Its tiny
spinach-like leaves once bounced along
dunes from South
Carolina to Massachusetts till habitat
loss, insensitive beach-
grooming tactics, and recreational
vehicles slashed figures
drastically. When ice decides it must
feel like being splintered
from a multiplex of tightness that pains
but holds together.
Aerial shot of 1961. Year submarine
thriller K-19 and Saving
Mr. Banks are
set in. Kennedy is president. The cloud of a hundred
musk oxen migrating back to Banks Island
rises plainly as
narrow-leafed campion, a handful of
whose seeds had slept
30 millennia before being found in 2007
in a ruined system of
ground squirrel burrows. Surveys will
report up to 800
heads in 1967 and a thousand more in
1970. All matter thunder-
cracking belowdecks: hoof of earth into
water, water over
air, air under water and up. So that the
vessel, broken, settles
onto sea stars on the floor. The seeds
were sown successfully
under grow lights in Siberia, deep in
whose permafrost
international high-fiving scientists
discovered a fully intact
woolly mammoth carcass. To enlarge my
sympathy I attempt
to picture the loud tarp tents around
the digging site, the lamp-
lengths they putter away to, the costs.
First
appearing in Poetry Magazine and then
as a chapbook published by Factory Hollow Press, the poem’s over-abundance proved
too much for some readers who admitted to quitting Hymn to Life halfway in. The failure of those to complete the poem was
in part due to its repetitiousness, which created an expectation of
predictability. As a result, some readers believed they didn’t have to complete
the poem to appreciate its meaning and it’s somewhat understandable: at times Hymn to Life has the vibe of a
conceptual poem. And yet it’s not and by not reading the entire poem, its full meaning
cannot entirely be apprehended. On the other hand, for those readers who never
completed Hymn to Life, the poem’s
meaning was certainly felt. Dissuaded
by the poem’s breadth, and since its biome didn’t reflect the modality of
customized experience we’ve been habituated to prefer, some readers were exposed
by their failure to simply focus on something so time-consuming and not of their choosing.
The set-up
to Hymn to Life puts the speaker in
the position of constantly looking backwards and as that backward-looking
process evolves, the poem gets smaller and smaller as it nears completion. Inescapably,
so does the future. Hymn to Life is a
poem about approaching extinction by participating in it, but not only as a
species – human and otherwise – but as someone with the imaginative faculty to
create (and destroy) and this is, it seems to me, one of Hymn to Life’s central challenges to the reader: how does one see
life through to the end?
In The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze’s
book on Frances Bacon, he writes “In art, and in painting as in music, it is
not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.”
Donnelly’s work has always been interested in seizing potency and in Hymn to Life
he’s still at it, but seizing that potency by combing the terrain of years gone
by. With vigor, the poet obsessively accrues information from the past, filling
the poem with mostly extinct or endangered animals and plant-life, but also
with trinkets of history and micro-asides. What makes Donnelly’s work in general so
uniquely his own is his fidelity to articulating an inner surplus. In the case of Hymn
to Life, that surplus is teased out from within the past, and the result is
a brilliant one: Donnelly has created a gorgeous, but melancholy memory project.
Located in the great previous, we
watch as the speaker exhaustively harvests various intersections of data, penetrating
facts into other facts, each occurring at different points in time. Reading Hymn to Life gives one the odd sensation
of the forward mobility of reading itself, a progressive movement, but in this
case one that is always a constituent part of the same erstwhile. And like the extinct or vanishing or tinkered-with
biosphere Donnelly describes, the speaker gets closer – one stanza after another – to joining them. The overall effect is
unsettling because the multiplicity of Hymn
to Life gives the poem a linguistic élan
vital, but so relentless is its total expression
that relief feels inevitable.
Deep into
the poem, the poet writes (see above) “To enlarge my sympathy I attempt to
picture the loud tarp tents around the digging site, the lamp-/lengths they
putter away to, the costs.” This phrase “to enlarge my sympathy” might be one of the most
earnest attempts by the speaker to locate a technique by which one can relate to
the world most humanely. Henri Bergson famously used the word “sympathy” to
describe a way in which an individual could reach a state of humility, or what
we might think of as surgical-imagining,
where the subject proceeds into the
object. For Bergson, sympathy was rooted in one’s ability to imagine someone's
pain, but from out of that originating source of the word’s definition, it
evolves and changes, and according to Bergson one didn’t arrive at true
sympathy until completing an internalized process in which one transitions from “repugnance
to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to humility.” We see Donnelly
potentially reach this humility at the end of the poem, where the
superstructure of the past dissolves into the granular existence of the domestic:
…I told my friend Dottie
when saddened in the predawn I have seen
the people pushing
small mountains of soda cans in their
shopping carts stop
in front of my recycling, open one bag
after another of empty
metal and glass, dig through them, take
what they need and shut
the bags back up with so much care it
has destroyed me. I remember
bathing my daughter when she was two and
how I stopped
short thinking if I were gone tomorrow
she wouldn’t even
remember. The year was 2007. Radio waves
associated with
cell phones may not have been
contributing to recent declines in
bee population. “And if you must destroy
me,” says the poem,
“I’ll tear myself away from you / as I would leave a friend.”
When there was time to put away the
dishes, they were gone.
When
Donnelly describes seeing people rummaging through his recycling and watches
them close the bags with “so much care”, the resulting feeling he experiences is
one of devastation. Rather than some form of hyperbolic pity for the scavengers, the
emotion is evidence of the speaker’s total immersion in the moment, hence
finding himself not reporting the scavengers, but being within the scavengers and also the very movements they enact when they carefully “shut the
bags back up”: true sympathy. Following this, the speaker reproduces the
Bergsonian process of sympathy by experiencing next the sensations of humility
as he bathes his two-year old daughter, realizing that if he were to die she would
never remember him. It’s something every parent contemplates, and therefore not
particularly remarkable, but in the context of the poem’s temporal concerns it
hits the perfect note: why is it important to remember? Or more broadly: does
it matter how we remember?
The last
line of the poem is equally intriguing in that it recalls a moment earlier in
the poem where Donnelly confesses that he promised his wife he’d do the dishes
before the babysitter arrives. However, he’s too busy working on the poem
titled "Hymn to Life" and he confesses
“I won’t be a person of my word tonight.” But one wonders, as the speaker
finally finds time to do the dishes and discovers they’re already done, if that’s
all he is: a word’s blind faith in a tomorrow. When his intention to wash the
dishes finally moves towards its fulfillment, the dishes are gone: and so is
the poem, so is the poet, and so is the reader.
Perhaps what
makes Hymn to Life one of the most
important long poems written in the last several years, aside from its
spectacular humanity, is its cultural relevancy. While many will (reasonably)
want to put the poem squarely into the category of ecopoetics because of its reliance
on natural history, and one cannot deny the poem’s ecological preoccupation, the poem is more philosophical at heart; a critique of the nature of time
and data in modernity. In his book 24/7:
Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary characterizes our life
in a digitized capitalism as one long “duration without breaks, defined by a
principle of continuous functioning.” The dynamism of Hymn to Life reflects this model of living, and its consequences, through its unremitting flow. It’s no wonder only three of the sixty stanzas in Hymn to Life end on a period and why some readers were resistant to
engage the poem: since its excessive energies couldn’t be customized, why bother?
A hymn is a
song of praise and this poem is too, which makes it refreshing in a critical
climate that is routinely negative about life. Daily experience might be
daunting in a morally impoverished world, but it doesn’t mean, Donnelly seems
to be arguing, we accept it and live in a society where the most sanctified act
we make in a given day is posting on Facebook a link to an article about the
latest injustice. Within praise is the inevitably of loss, and Hymn to Life always holds these two
feelings suspended before the reader at once. Its atmosphere of sadness and
hope is the outcome of knowing that when we have nothing left to praise, when
we reserve the exclusive right to know only what we want to know, then the incentive to preserve vanishes. By transcribing the past – and having
the unprecedented ability to do so – Donnelly shows how it can possibly nurture (rather
than inconvenience) the present and that without memory our compassion for all
that lives becomes endangered.
No comments:
Post a Comment